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4.24.2008

A Necessary Fence

We very much welcome a victory by either party.
     —John Browne, Amoco CEO, on the outcome of the 2000 Presidential Election

Hillary, Obama, and McCain are the best America can come up with? How much more transparent can it be that the office of President is a slot filled by the one who can claw their way to the top to best serve their elite puppetmasters? A harridan, an empty vessel, and a bona-fide nut, all espousing minor variations of the same ideological theme. Once again the voters are asked to take it up the ass, this time without any lubricant, and, though some party-poopers may grumble a bit, they obligingly bend over.

The transparent and illimitable contempt of the ruling classes towards the public certainly seems warranted, given how easily the public gloms onto the spectacle of a cynical and vicious race between equally repellant moral monsters, instead of demanding candidates that serve the increasingly dire needs of a society in precipitous decline.

When Murka emerged triumphant from the Landowner's War Against Taxes (aka The Murkan Revolution) it had to fashion some sort of government that cleverly promised freedom and the pursuit of happiness for everybody (ie: white males) while simultaneously protecting the wealth and power of the privileged. As Chomsky likes to quote James Madison: "the primary reponsibility of government is 'to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.'"

This is a good thing to keep in mind when considering how, just to give an arbitrary example, the majority is faced once again with a presidential election in which the three front runners all share a viewpoint that benefits the power elite against the interests of the majority.

For a more technical analysis of how this came to be, here's a summary from biographer Robert A. Caro's third tome on LBJ:

[The] creators of a government of the people feared not only the people's rulers but the people themselves, the people in their numbers, the people in their passions, what the Founding Father Edmund Randolph called "the turbulence and follies of democracy."

The Framers of the Constitution feared the people's power because they were, many of them, members of what in America constituted an aristocracy, an aristocracy of the educated, the well-born, and the well-to-do, and they mistrusted those who were not educated or well-born or well-to-do. More specifically, they feared the people's power because, possessing, and esteeming property, they wanted the rights of property protected against those who did not possess it. In the notes he made for a speech in the Constitutional Convention, James Madison wrote of the "real or supposed difference of interests" between "the rich and the poor"—"those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings"—and of the fact that over the ages to come the latter would come to outnumber the former. "According to the equal laws of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the latter," he noted. "Symptoms, of a leveling spirit, as we have understood, have sufficiently appeared in certain quarters to give notice of the future danger." But the Framers feared the people's power also because they hated tyranny, and they knew there could be a tyranny of the people as well as the tyranny of a King, particularly in a system designed so that, in many ways, the majority ruled. "Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power," Madison wrote. These abuses were more likely because the emotions of men in the mass ran high and fast, they were "liable to err... from fickleness and passion," and "the major interest might under sudden impulses be tempted to commit injustice on the minority."

So the Framers wanted to check and restrain not only the people's rulers, but the people; they wanted to erect what Madison called "a necessary fence" against the majority will. To create such a fence, they decided that the Congress would have not one house but two, and that while the lower house would be designed to reflect the popular will, that would not be the purpose of the upper house. How, Madison asked, is "the future danger"—the danger of "a levelling spirit"—"to be guarded against on republican principles? How is the danger in all cases of interested coalitions to oppress the minority to be guarded against? Among other means by the establishment of a body in the government sufficiently respectable for its wisdom and virtue, to aid on such emergencies, the preponderance of justice by throwing its weight into that scale." This body, said Madison, was to be the Senate. Summarizing in the Constitutional Convention the ends that would be served by this proposed upper house of Congress, Madison said they were "first to protect the people against their rulers; secondly to protect the people against the transient impressions into which they themselves might be led."

⋅ ⋅ ⋅

...When one of the Framers, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, suggested that [senators] be elected by the people, not a single member of the Convention rose to support him. "The people should have as little to do as may be about the government," Roger Sherman declared. "They lack information and are constantly liable to be misled." After Elbridge Gerry said that "The evils we experience flow from an excess of democracy," the Framers took steps to guard against such an excess. There would, they decided, be a "filtration" or "refinement" of the people's will before it reached the Senate: senators would be elected not by the people but by the legislatures of their respective states—a drastic filtration since in 1787 the franchise was so narrow that the legislatures themselves were elected by only a small percentage of the citizenry.

That Mr. Caro is talking about the Senate does not mean the same sorts of embedded elite-protecting failsafes don't also apply to the executive branch: the President is not chosen by the people, remember, but by an electoral college; and, before that, by even more granular filtering that occurs every step of the way via machine-driven candidate selection between two factions of a single party that doesn't like outsiders hampering the works. (The farcical ritual of the awesome importance to always have to select between the lesser of two evils to prevent a worse evil is specifically designed to preclude any challenges coming from without; that's why the greatest vituperation is directed at those who threaten to vote for a third party candidate, especially those who dare to challenge the whole game (ie: protecting the interests of property) from the left.)

Murka is a country founded on the rights of property, and about the only thing that's changed since its bloody birth is that some things that were once property — ie: people — achieved legal personhood (after much more bloodletting, of course). It's also interesting to consider that shortly after this wrenching transformation of property into people — so vigorously and violently opposed, remember — that a new class of person was created, almost as if to compensate for the loss; and, in a fitting irony, these newly defined legal fictitious entities, these "corporate persons", quickly became everyone's new master, making slaves of us all. (Tragically this unholy beast, accidentally summoned yet!, proved uncontrollable and now seeks to enslave the world.)

This is the schizophrenic fissure at the root of the Murkan psyche — the promise of freedom for all, while structurally handing it only to the propertied classes. And into this yawning chasm — which is roped off and ignored by the entire society — has crept a theology of greed that, like some kind of horrific economic black hole, threatens to engulf the world in its eschatological ecstasy. A whimpering end of history indeed.

And with the concentration of media power, that "necessary fence" is truly a propaganda enclosure. As one of the Framers said, "They lack information and are constantly liable to be misled." Clearly, this is proven time and time again — with each election, in fact; or with each war, with each corporate bailout, with each humane bombing, with each extrajudicial assassination, with each new free-trade agreement, with each new law against some consensual act, with each denial of executive malfeasance, with each tax cut for the wealthy, with each new surge, with each spending cut for human aid, with each justification for precision bombing funerals and weddings, with each new supreme court justice, with each new terror alert, with each new security precaution, with each removal of footwear at the airport, with each new non-lethal weapon, with each protest pen, with each red-herring (sex scandal; prayer in schools; etc), with each passage of some bill that empowers the police state, with each new rollback of some legal protection (eg: habeas corpus), with each new justification of torture; etc...

So next time you're wondering how it is that a purported "democracy" like Murka proffers three such miserable choices for president, keep in mind that the Framers of the Constitution themselves hated democracy — for everybody, that is, except themselves. We the People set the tone for the new country's penchant for euphemistic doublespeak when what was clearly meant was We the Propertied. Murka is their game, their casino, their land, and it always has been. The house always wins, and the fix is always in. Always. The role of the public in their table game of democracy is exactly like that of the audience in America's Funniest Home Videos: to dissemble enthusiasm while calmly and happily voting for one of the pre-ordained candidates chosen by some invisible body of judges who have a knack for narrowing all the choices down to the three most disappointing.

4.22.2008

The War on Terror in 118 words

...the misnamed "war on terror" is, in theory and in practice, a war of terror waged against resistant individuals and populations who have risen up against U.S. imperialist depredations. As the Empire's hegemony is challenged across the planet, the control of other nations' resources deemed "vital" by U.S. multinational corporate looters, not the safety or security of the American people, is the primary motivator of America's destructive wars of conquest.

Since 9/11, the Bush administration and their legal sycophants in the Justice Department and right-wing think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society, have claimed that the criminal regime in Washington has the legal right to employ any tactic to pursue its sordid agenda.

The Torture Agenda by Tom Burghardt

4.16.2008

'sociopathic behavior becoming the norm'

It's all falling apart.

A frightening, astute comment by Galen April 16th, 2008 12:04 pm following this article:
Capitalism that holds the reigns of government is FASCISM!

There are multiple revolving doors between government, industry and the intelligence services.

Therefore, there are multiple avenues for evil men to come to power, and many of them are corrupt beyond the concept.

A new study was recently released that stated that sociopathic behavior was becoming the accepted norm.

Given the polluted society (North America) that was examined, it’s no surprise. All you have to do is listen on the street corners to hear the youth of today brag about how often they are arrested and jailed. How women and girls are degraded sexually by their male peer and the fashion industry. And take into account how utterly pervasive technology that separates you from daily human contact has become. Cars, cellphones,i-Pods. All DESIGNED to ISOLATE you from your fellow human being.

If you do not know who your fellows are, you care nothing about them, and therefore can feel no empathy for them. This allows you to behave in ways unthinkably barbaric to them. QED.

This present form of capitalist consumerism masquerading as government and society is the ultimate expression of greed and inhumanity. we have become, LITERALLY, nothing more than cogs and gears in a vast money machine that runs on blood.

This, too, is also an important observation in the same comment section by TrudyS April 16th, 2008 11:36 am:
This reminds me of an Einstein quote: “Two things are infinite:the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”

No matter how many times the stock market crashes, or inflation wipes out savings, or corporate scandals are exposed, people continuely clammer for investment portfolio’s or real estate speculation so that they can become rich beyond their wildest dreams. Greed is rampant but no one sees it in themselves, only in those with more than they have. Avarice (greed for those who don’t know what avarice means) is one of the seven deadly sins for a reason. Unfortunately, like too many other things it gets glossed over or ignored completely. The blame for the situation we find ourselves in goes all around, how many people supported de-regulation in order to get ‘government off our backs’? How many people agreed that all government agencies should be run like businesses?

Until we recognize our own culpability in all of this, nothing will change. One of the ‘family values’ that so many people embrace should be sharing and caring without judgement and teaching our children that greed is dangerous to all.

I have come to the conclusion that Greed really is the most deadly of the seven deadly sins. Greed is not only the psychopathy that defines our epoch, it is the very hermeneutic filter of our worldview, the religious ether of our time that compels conformity. BushCo, the bankers, the entire financial system driving the world to what may be its eschatological denouement are the modern economic incarnation of Torquemada and his Inquisition, compelling obedience to the Word of Private Property under pain of genocidal death. No one is without sin, and all must be converted.